Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Booby Trap (1970)

One of several ’70s movies about angry men from
the World War II generation declaring war on hippies, this abysmal drive-in
picture features the sensational premise of a psycho planning mass murder at a
music festival. Suffice to say, cowriter-director Dwayne Avery hasn’t a clue
how to realize the potential of this premise, and Booby Trap—befitting its title—spends more time on boring sex
scenes than on suspenseful vignettes dramatizing the villain’s outrageous scheme
to kill flower children. In fact, so much of the picture’s screen time gets
chewed up on carnal encounters and strip scenes that Booby Trap ends up feeling a lot like a porno flick without the
money shots, right down to the cheap production values and unforgivably bad
acting. Anyway, unhinged Jack Brennan (Carl Monson) buys a cache of Claymore
anti-personnel mines on the black market, then makes his way across the dusty
American southwest to the location of a planned Woodstock-type event.
Investigators tracking the stolen munitions follow clues, leading to the
inevitable showdown between a lawman and the wannabe mass murderer. Beyond the
rotten camerawork and sloppy sound recording, Booby Trap suffers from incompetent pacing. Early on, the movie is
derailed by a pointless subplot when Jack picks up a hippie hitchhiker, sleeps
with her, and kills her the next morning. Similarly, the movie stops dead close
to the ending so the lawman chasing Jack can have his own sex scene. Is Booby Trap an action movie, softcore
sleaze, or a thriller? Does anyone actually care enough to make that determination? Oh, well. If nothing else, it’s pleasant to ponder the potent potboiler a proper provocateur
could have produced from this premise.